Are we prisoners without knowing it?

In the first chapter of The Panopticon, a novel by Jenni Fagan, Anais, a 15-year-old woman living in a care home, is being taken to the Panopticon, which she describes as follows: “The Panopticon looms in a big crescent at the end of a long driveway. It’s four floors high, two turrets on either side and a peak in the middle—that’ll be where the watch-tower is” (Fagan 1:5).

Ellman in her review of this novel described the Panopticon as “a Victorian tower of social-work babble, reclaimed from its previous function as a jail … built so that the guards, if there are any, an watch over everyone from a central position which gives them a view into each room on every floor.” Another point to consider is that “it’s never clear how real all the surveilliance is” (Ellman 1).

Now that you have a clearer idea of what the panopticon is, I would like to connect the idea of being sent to it with some of Foucault ideas on the relation between madness and exclusion. For example, “Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then ‘knew,’ had an affinity for each  other” (Foucault 2). Also, “the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw much social unrest and economic depression, which they tried to solve by imprisoning the indigents with the criminals and forcing them to work. The demented fitted quite naturally between those two extremes of social maladjustment and iniquity” (Foucault 2).

The two ideas I quoted from Foucault show that the ones that didn’t fit were excluded from society. This also happens in the world of The Panopticon, which is seen in the following comment the policewoman makes to Anais on her way to the Panopticon: “They’ll not be scared of you in there” (Fagan 1: 5). This comment clearly shows that Anais doesn’t fit, which is why she must be kept in there.

In order to make the connection with Hamlet, I have to remind you of another idea behind The Panopticon—that we are being constantly observed. This clearly happens to Hamlet when Claudius sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on his naphew:

Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Moreover that we much did long to see you,

 The need we have to use you did provoke

 Our hasty sending.Something have you heard

Of Hamlet’s transformation: so call it,

Sith nor th’exterior nor the inward man

 Resembles that it was. What it should be,

More than his father’s death, that thus hath put him

So much from th’understanding of himself,

I cannot dream of.I entreat you both,

That, being of so young days brought up with him,

And sith so neighboured to his youth and havior,

 That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court

 Some little time, so by your companies

 To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather,

So much as from occasion you may glean (Shakespiare 2. 2: 60)

Other examples of that include Ophelia spying on Hamlet so as to report to her father Polonius, and Reynaldo spying on Laertes.

Now, all of the above is fiction, but is it really fiction that we are being spied on? Hasn’t it happened to you that you get calls from people to offer you certain products when you haven’t even given them your cellphone number? It probably has, which shows you this idea isn’t really that much of a fiction as we  think it is. Think of what Facebook can do with all the information it has and continues to record everyday.

Works cited

Ellman, Lucy. The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan—review. www.theguardian.com. 2012. Available http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/18/the-panopticon-jenni-fagan-review

Fagan, Jenni. The Panopticon. Link to chapter one: http://readinggroups.org/Chapter%20One%20-%20Panopticon.pdf

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization—A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1989. London: Routledge.

Shakespiare, William. Hamlet.